Financial Follow-Through

I met with my financial advisor today to start the roll-over process for my 401(k).  This has not been easy as the plan has a very difficult website that requires me to log into two separate portals, and one of them never works.  They have reset my pin probably ten times, they send the notice to my old work email address, etc.  The form I got in the mail was hard to understand and they pre-filled a few fields incorrectly.  We called for support and got a person with an accent so thick she was hard to understand.  But I think we are ready to move forward and having someone to handle the bulk of it was wonderful.


We've been investing from the day we started working.  Our first investment was in company stock.  We both worked for CVS, which was owned by Melville at the time.  We invested via payroll deductions -- and that was not a 401(k) or IRA.  The stock did well.  I then rolled it into another fund along with a small cash deposit, maybe $1000 to start.  For ten years, we couldn't manage to put more money in that fund, but I did start a 401(k) at work.  Ten years after buying that fund, we cashed it in for the down payment on our first house.  It had grown to 10K!

A few years after we were in the new house, we opened another investment account in the same plan that did so well for us.  TBG started investing in his employer 401(k) programs too.   His current employer also has an employee stock option plan (ESOP), which has gone through a few transformations over the years and has moved from shares in the company to the investment of their profits in a fund.  So he really has three different plans.  Being the recent job-hopper that I am, having my own IRA has been great -- I always roll my money into that account.  It's all in one place and I am now at the next to lowest discount level for commission fees.  My fund also has a very low overhead/administration structure, so more money goes towards investments and less to plan managers.

The new advisor who took over when my prior advisor retired, is nice and we hit it off.  He thinks we are in a really good position for retirement, so I am not sweating that my contributions will stop because I am now part time.  We still plan to contribute as much as we can to our HSA.  I will try to keep as much of my HSA from the old job intact as possible.  Once the plan we have for TBG is sufficiently funded, I will probably move my $$ into the investment portion of the HSA.  I see that as the way to pay for insurance before we are Medicare eligible, or for Part-B.

This money stuff is such a hassle, but I feel lucky that I have the funds to have that kind of headache.  The process does need to be easier -- maybe then more people would learn more about it.  It makes it easy to live a frugal lifestyle because we understand how saving/investing works.  I admit, sometimes I think it would be nice to have a BMW -- but it would have to be ten years old!